April 24, 2016

Just like poets and artists, bureaucrats are born, not made; it takes normal humans extraordinary effort to keep attention on such boring tasks. [p.47]

The exponential information age is like a verbally incontinent person; he talks more and more as fewer and fewer people listen. [p.49]

You want be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration. [p.54]

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone. [p.63]

People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership. [p.67]

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine -- and nonperishable -- work within institutions. [p.79]

We should make students recompute their GPAs by counting their grades in finance and economics backward. [p.91]

[Footnote] *The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication in the Internet age -- this "nerdification," to put it bluntly -- is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanistic minds take insults a bit too literally. [p.110]